She lives in quiet Topanga Canyon, but she teaches ukulele worldwide

During the early days of COVID, Melanie Lawson Kareem found the Topanga Canyon Library closed. She was scheduled to teach the ukelele in the library. So she called her students and said, “Don’t come to the library. Try to figure out how to join a Zoom session on your computers.”

About 30 of her students were able to do it, and at the end of the Zoom session, according to Kareem, “We all looked at each other and said, ‘Well, what are we doing tomorrow?’”

They were all locked down in their homes due to COVID.